Bit Part Badguys

aka: Lowly Criminal

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They're not the Big Bad; they're too small time for that. Heck, they're not even Monster of the Week level. But they're not working for another villain, either, so they're not really Mooks. These are Villains whose duty is to show up for a single scene, maybe two if they're lucky, and cause some minor trouble before the heroes kick them into next week and move on to the real plot.

Why bother including such a meaningless bad guy? It could be the story was running a little light on its action quotient and needed an excuse for some mindless violence. Maybe the writers wanted to show what the heroes' lives are like in-between more significant adversaries, or create an Establishing Character Moment for a hero we don't know very well yet. Maybe the episode was running a little short, and they had to fill up an extra five minutes with something.

Or maybe, while the Bit Part Bad Guys themselves aren't important, something that happens during the fight with them is. The hero might meet the Girl of the Week by saving them from one of these villains, or maybe it's during one of these quick fights that the Superhero will discover something's wrong with their powers, or maybe, because the hero was busy taking this bad guy down, they weren't at home to stop someone from getting kidnapped or worse, which may even elevate them to the level of Small Role, Big Impact.

Codename: Sailor V has a few ordinary bandits and other criminals who exist only to show that Minako wants to humiliate the police by stealing their job, introduce a number of police officers as recurring characters and explain why Sailor V is a celebrity by the time of Sailor Moon.

The plot of one chapter was kicked off by Sailor V wasting time in beating up two bullies, thus not having time to change back into Minako to take part to a lottery and winning a vacation to Hawaii as Sailor V.

The beginning of A Dame To Kill For features the private investigator main character spying on an abusive boyfriend and beating him up when he tries to hurt his mistress.

Also in ADTKF is a brief scene where Marv shows up to take out some bad guys at Kadie's. This is subverted in that Marv was a secondary character in that story.

Hell And Back also features a brief scene when Manute shows up to fight Wallace. Manute was working for a different mob boss that had ties to the Big Bad but otherwise, this was a bit part for him.

Generally any of the petty criminals Judge Dredd deals with on a daily basis are this, particularly in one shot strips. Even in some of the Mega Epics, Dredd can be seen cracking skulls or getting into firefights with minor criminals while musing over the greater storyline.

Animated Film

A Bug's Life has an example in the smallest way possible both figuratively and literally with the Fly Brothers who do not even interact with Flik at all and only antagonise Francis causing a huge misunderstanding that leads to Flik mistaking the Circus Bugs for warriors and hiring them.

Ice Age: The two brontotheres Carl and Frank are there only to make Sid latch on to Manny for protection after they attempted to murder him.

In The Incredibles, Bomb Voyage's confrontation with Mr. Incredible is significant only in that it gives Buddy an opening to try to get recruited as a sidekick and puts the hero under enough pressure to sharpen the rudeness of his rejection.

Two muggers show up at the beginning of the first Tim Burton Batman movie, robbing an innocent tourist family (with one mugger pulling a Kick the Dog moment by turning his gun on the family's kid), laying down the fearsome reputation of "the bat" and then getting their asses kicked by the Batman.

Just about every Batman film since then has featured at least one such character. Batman Returns included a brief scene with a nameless, nondescript mugger (and, it is strongly implied, rapist) who exists only as an Asshole Victim to get butchered by Catwoman — and, of course, to establish that Selina Kyle has Taken a Level in Badass after all the injustices done to her and will never be the same again.

Batman Forever, on the other hand, featured an entire street gang sporting a weird combination of tribal face paint and Tron-like glow-in-the-dark uniforms who are so eye-catching that they veer dangerously close to Ensemble Darkhorse territory. What makes this so jarring is that they only appear in one scene, and then only as an opportunity for Dick Grayson (the future Robin) to demonstrate his latent fighting skills and also to work through his great anger at having seen his entire family murdered by the Dragon of the film, Two-Face. (Interestingly enough, a lot of planning went into the creation of these one-shot villains, with the film's costume designers studying Aboriginal rock paintings to get a feel for how they should look.)

Batman & Robin, by virtue of its notoriously Biblical cast of characters, has two instances: the punk bikers whom Dick Grayson and Barbara Wilson race on motorcycles through a tunnel in the "bad" part of town; and another group of Day-Glo, tribal thugs who exist only for Bane to have somebody to beat up.

In the Line of Fire begins with Clint Eastwood's character busting unimportant counterfeiters while undercover.

Block and Tackle of the H.I.V.E. Series have little impact on the story besides what others tell them to do. They are simply generic mooks who happen to be mean, and show up to terrorize the protagonists in every volume whether or not they contribute to the plot. They're usually gone in five pages or less.

Duke, a villain from the Warrior Cats book The Lost Warrior is one of these. His only reason for existing was so that Graystripe could fight someone in the first book, and out of all the villains in the series, he is one of the quickest to go down.

As the show continued, vampires gradually lost their Villain Pedigree, going from Big Bads to Monsters of the Week, to Mooks, until in the later seasons (around Season 3 or so) they appeared almost exclusively as Bit Part Bad Guys. We'd see Buffy patrolling the graveyard, quickly dispatching a few vampires who don't even get a single line, then we'd shift scenes to the real plot of the episode. Other kinds of demons would occasionally fill this role, too, but since those required more expensive makeup effects then vampires, they tended to be saved for more important roles.

They're so minor, "weevil hunting" is the excuse Jack and Ianto use when they need to sneak out of work for some alone time.

The Blowfish in "Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang" is basically used to set up Torchwood Three's status as Everyone Knew Already and Jack's return.

Poor old Cenred from Merlin. He was only incorporated because the Big Bads Morgana and Morgause needed his army to overrun Camelot, and he never gets to fight either Arthur or Uther before he's killed off in a classic case of You Have Outlived Your Usefulness.

It happened again with Helios in series three, a warlord whose sole purpose is to provide the man-power for a takeover, and then die in battle.

Ace Attorney games often include one of these as the culprit for the first trial that serves as a tutorial for new players.

The Powder Gangers in Fallout: New Vegas are a gang of escaped convicts. They're probably the weakest faction in the game and play no role in the main story line, beyond being warm up for players at the beginning.

Other then possibly The Fiends and White Legs-who both have a loose alliance with The Legion and are genuine threat to the region-pretty much any group of raiders in the games are this.

The general formula in the Touhou series is that the first two bosses will have absolutely nothing to do with the plot, and the third will actually kick the main plot off (either by being loyal to the villains or leading you to them). These bit part bosses are often quite popular (one eventually starred her own game!) and most of them are grouped together in fanworks. Exceptions to both rules exist though.

Urbzville in The Urbz is terrorized by 3 villains, Urangoo McBain, Kiki Blunt and Harry Snivel, who show up once in a while to mug the local Urb and generally cause trouble. However, once the player perform the district's Power Social move on them, they'll leave for good.

Arguably Daimyo Kubota from The Order of the Stick. While it's noteworthy that Kubota is a competent villain and hangs around in the comics or a fairly decent stretch of time, in the end he's just a scheming noble whose ambition is to take over his particular Deadly Decadent Court, largely by political manipulation and taking advantage of the local justice system. By comparison the comic's Big Bad is a sadistic and cruel Person of Mass Destruction who killed an entire room of paladins with a bouncing ball, is looking to Take Over the World, and stands a pretty decent chance of actually destroying the world along the way. Kubota is pretty small time in comparison, regardless of the amount of attention he got in a minor story arc. Lampshaded when V casually murders Kubota and then asks in exasperation "Now can we PLEASE resume saving the world?"

Generator Rex often begins its episodes with Rex beating the tar out of a rampaging EVO and usually curing it afterward.

Justice League did this occasionally, in one case with Batman and Superman fighting some sports-themed villains while casually talking about Captain Marvel. Apparently they're so caught up in the conversation they forget what the bad guys were even after in the first place.

The general census amongst Static Shock fans was that, should Carmendillo make appearance, he usually fills this role.

Teen Titans had a lot of these, usually of the bizarre monster variety. However, Control Freak made a good enough impression during his brief fight in "Fear Itself" that he was later made the main villain of a couple episodes.

Also Dr. Light was used as the punching bag to show Raven losing control of her emotions briefly. Which leads to a funny Call Back when Dr. Light shows up again:

Chopshop shows up for the first half of one episode ("SWAT Kats Unplugged") and is never seen or mentioned again. The main reason he's remembered is because fans still debate whether T-Bone meant it literally when he called him a "laughing hyena".

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